Mars rover beams back eerie human voice – and postcards

THE first broadcast of a human voice from another planet tells us nothing new about our solar system, but talk about eerie. The Mars Curiosity rover has beamed back the disembodied voice of NASA administrator Charles Bolden making a speech recorded before Curiosity launched.

The stunt is one of a string of firsts for the rover, which landed safely on the Red Planet on 6 August. These include beaming back stunning high-resolution colour images: the "postcard" to the right shows Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons, the focus of Curiosity's search for signs of life. Curiosity has also stretched its robotic arm, and taken its first steps away from the landing site, which the team last week named after science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury Landing is the first named site on Mars not marked by an object, but by ephemeral burn scars from the rover's landing thrusters. Project scientist John Grotzinger describes the site as "four scour marks with wheel tracks that basically begin from nowhere".

Curiosity took its first sniff with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which has two spectrometers for determining atmospheric composition. Rather like Bolden's canned speech, however, the whiff wasn't Martian in origin. The pumps meant to clear the instrument of residual Earthly gases jammed, said SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy, "so for our first sample, we did not measure Mars atmosphere, we measured Florida air".

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

The search for life begins on Mount Sharp (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)